All his translations have been published by the linguist Walter Sauer’s Edition Tintenfass, a German press which has published children’s literature in more than 200 languages to date, including endangered and minority languages.
Although the books sell well, Gwee owns up to a feeling of “disappointment” when parents tell him they are buying these books for their children. He thinks his translations deserve to be read by adults too.
“Nobody has read a literary text in Singlish until now, so technically, everybody is an eight-year-old when it comes to reading Singlish,” says Gwee. “I’m also learning the art of translating.”
He found it challenging to coax the Singlish voice in his first book The Leeter Tunku (2019), a translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s French classic The Little Prince. It was only when he started translating English writer Beatrix Potter and German folklorists Brothers Grimm that he grew more confident with his craft.
Still, Gwee is accustomed to negative comments from readers who insist that his Singlish is not accurate or that it contains too much “old people’s Singlish”. But that is exactly his point: the Singlish he uses in his translations belong not just to one person – certainly not himself.
“I’m quite conscious that every paragraph should have a mix of different languages,” he says, adding that he was also conscious to include young people’s Singlish, which may be influenced by global slang, the Internet and K-pop.
He says: “As long as it’s not one person hearing just his or her Singlish, I am in a good place. Hopefully, this will bring us together and we can hear one another’s Singlish and also our own.”
Gwee is aware that varying the vocabularies and registers of Singlish in Winnie-da-Pooh helps create a distinct personality for each character. For a book that thrives on word play, he had to find creative ways to translate the humour where there may be no Singlish equivalent.
To that end, he says his habit is to eavesdrop in public and “to have an ear in as many conservations as you can”.
He keeps a running document titled “Next book – Singlish words” on his laptop, tracking the ways Singlish is evolving as a living language.